


if you go chasing rabbits (and you know you're going to fall)

by gay_writes_with_mac



Series: Prodigal Son [4]
Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019), Supernatural
Genre: Dani Powell Whump, Dani and JT Are Hunters, Demon Hunters, Demons, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Implied Sexual Content, Magic, Malcolm Is A Consultant, Murder, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Supernatural - Freeform, Supernatural AU - Freeform, Vengeful Spirits, Vomiting, this isn't a multichap yet but if theres interest i will change that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:27:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27718157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gay_writes_with_mac/pseuds/gay_writes_with_mac
Summary: I'll keep fighting.Dani Powell is hunting something. When she was sixteen years old, a demon killed her father and scarred her for life.Ten years later, she's not a little girl anymore. She wants blood and she aims to get it.A quiet little town in rural Wyoming yields unexpected results to her and her partner, including a demon and a cocky young man who calls himself a consultant. And whenever a hunt pops up, Dani's there ready for it.I'll keep swinging till I gotnothing left.
Relationships: Dani Powell & JT Tarmel, Malcolm Bright/Dani Powell
Series: Prodigal Son [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2019443
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25





	if you go chasing rabbits (and you know you're going to fall)

**Author's Note:**

> When you're halfway through a WIP, there's only one thing to do: start a new one. 
> 
> Or, the Supernatural/Prodigal Son crossover no one asked for. 
> 
> Follow my Tumblr @gay-writes-with-mac for fic updates and other fun stuff. Or do not. I am not a beggar. 
> 
> Playlist for fic: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1xxYqxyHpM43nPXiAIXu4o?si=ahU7KDK3R3WOJVsXeh67-w

“Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole.” 

Dani reaches over, smacking away JT’s hand before he can even  _ dream  _ about touching her CD collection. “House rules, remember?”

“House rules shouldn’t apply when the driver’s pick is AC/DC for the fifth day straight,” JT grumbles, pulling his hand back anyway. “You have my dad’s taste in music.”

“That meant to hurt my feelings?” Dani flicks her sunglasses down so they fall over her eyes, one hand gripping the wheel as she pulls away from the station where they’d stopped for fuel, food, and smokes. “If you don’t like it, you can drive.”

“You’ve never let me drive the Impala a day in your life,” JT points out.

“Sounds like someone’s shit out of luck, then, huh?” Dani bends down as much as she can while still keeping her eyes half on the road, rifling around in the glovebox until she retrieves a pack of cigarettes, holding it out to JT for a light. Still sulking, he obliges grudgingly, and she brings it to her lips, taking a deep inhale.

“I never should have partnered up with you.” JT glares at her from the passenger seat. From somewhere in his leather jacket, he produces a gleaming blade, wiping it down with a rag meaningfully in her direction. 

“I got one twice that big on my belt.” She thinks about brake-checking him, but decides against it for now; knives and sudden stops don’t mix well, and the Impala doesn’t deserve that kind of rough treatment. “Besides, you should be glad you got with me. Know why?”

“Why?” JT grunts, sheathing his knife again.

Dani smirks, and then she really does brake-check him, stomping on the pedal so hard the car skids a little down the dried-out dirt road, kicking up a spray of dust twice as tall as the Impala. “‘’Cause I got a cool car.”

“I’m gonna slash your tires in your sleep.”

“And where would that leave you, Juliet Torpedo?” Dani steadies the wheel, patting it comfortingly. “It’s okay, baby. I’m never gonna treat you that rough again.”

“You mind gettin’ a room?” JT rolls his eyes, fishing down into his heavy-duty backpack for something - the makings of a case file, Dani’s guessing, from what she can see out of the corner of her eye.

Whenever they come across other hunters, it always goes the same way. First they peg JT as the hunter and Dani as his piece of ass coasting along for the thrills of the life. Then they guess that JT’s the one getting his hands dirty and Dani tags along, putting together his case files and cleaning his guns. Not that it’s unheard of. People who find gigs are real heroes. Dani still picks up the occasional case from Ellen Harvelle whenever they’re going through a dry spell. But not for her. That was never for her, not even when she was waiting tables at the roadhouse.

She was smart. Bided her time. She wanted blood but she didn’t let desire blind her. She brought hunters refills on their drinks and picked Jo Harvelle’s brain for anecdotes from when her dad was still alive and flirted them into handing over their big gleaming knives and she  _ learned.  _ She taught herself from the ground up and it wasn’t until she was good and ready that she went out on her own, stole the Impala from a hunter just because she liked it, loaded up on rock salt and her first firearm, and blasted an angry spirit with a taste for pushing cars over the edge of the rickety old bridge it haunted so far into hell it’d have coals shoved up its undead ass for decades.

It had been years on her own before she’d taken a partner. She’d promised herself she’d always work alone. The hunter life meant that there was a whole lot of going out and not a lot of coming back. It had been hard enough to leave the roadhouse behind. Her last day there had been the closest she’d ever come to understanding how spirits came to be; a part of herself had splintered off and drifted away. Sometimes she still didn’t feel whole, a critical part of herself lingering at the old saloon. Her ghost still laughed with Jo sometimes.

But JT had been different. Dani had stopped in a hole-in-the-ground town somewhere in the depths of rural Nebraska. She’d booked herself a room in the town’s only motel and gone next door to cheat at poker until she could afford a few drinks and her room fee for the night. Her lead had been a bust; she was just wandering, floating around the Midwest waiting for something to tie her back down.

She’d stuffed a fat roll of twenties in her pocket already when JT sat down and challenged her. There was that stupid cocky smirk in his eye, that one men always got when they thought they saw a soft target in her. All he bet her was a drink. Dani accepted. The most she had to lose was a few bucks at the bar, and she was never one to turn down a chance for a free drink. Besides, she liked wiping that smirk off arrogant men’s faces.

Dani beat him at poker so badly he nearly got laughed out of the place. After five minutes of browbeating from the rest of the bar and inexplicably getting called gay (fellas, is it gay to lose a poker game to a woman?), he bought her that drink, and challenged her to a game of darts while they were at it.

Dani could do darts, kind of. She was  _ okay.  _ JT could have gone pro if he’d wanted to. It was her turn to eat his dust. He bought her a drink, she bought him one, and they sat down at the bar and talked.

They were hunting the same thing. That brought them together ten times tighter than a game of poker or a shared drink. Dani was avenging her father; JT, his wife. Same story down to the minutiae. They’d said goodbye. Gone to work; Dani at a rundown Subway franchise she was half-convinced the rest of the company had forgotten existed and JT as a cop. That made sense, she’d decided; he would have made a good cop. She’d always thought she’d be one herself after she finished up high school. Maybe she was, in some sense. 

Then they’d come home to an empty house. Looked everywhere, checked the basement last. And come down the stairs just in time to come face-to-face with a corpse so shredded an open casket was out of the question then and there and a hunch-backed figure with a mat of tangled, greasy black hair hanging over its face. “Like Samara from  _ The Ring, _ ” Dani had said at the time, staring down into her whiskey glass. 

The figure had dipped its fingers into the blood - of which there was plenty to work with - reached out, and written in the air a few feet away from them. There had been an awful burning sensation - “Like being branded,” JT said. “Like it wrote on me with a red-hot poker,” Dani agreed, her hand drifting subconsciously to her side where the words were still burned, as fresh as they were the day they were etched into her flesh.

And no one had believed them. The only difference was why.  _ Trauma,  _ the investigating officer had told Dani’s mother, patting the top of her head like she was a pouting toddler.  _ Emotional distress makes people see things.  _ At the time, she’d been infuriated. Now she realized that, as humiliating as it was, there were certain luxuries afforded to her as a sixteen-year-old girl. 

Like not being suspected of the murder herself. 

But that’s what had happened to JT. He’d had a rock-solid alibi and that was the only thing that saved him. If there hadn’t been security footage of him in that gas station, picking up beer and a pack of candy for Tally, he’d be behind bars by now.

That had been over a year ago. They’d been on dozens of hunts together, and as much as it pained her to say it, they worked better together. Dani had hundreds of bypassers’ worth of lore trapped in her head, and what she didn’t know, she could find out. She was a crack shot with a handgun, she wasn’t afraid of anything (or at least she didn’t show it), and even JT had been forced to admit that she had a real knack for spellwork.

JT himself could shoot as well as she could. Cases seemed to stumble and fall right into his lap; guys like him got that kind of treatment. When somebody had a problem, a problem that scared them really, really bad, JT was a real reassuring dude to talk to. And that was how he’d ended up doing their case files; most of them, anyway. He usually had to call Dani in for the smaller details of whatever they were hunting; she had an aptitude for remembering the fine print.

JT found out what they were going to kill. Dani found out how to kill it. Then they found the sucker together and wasted it.

“Do you even know where you’re driving?” JT asks, snapping her back out of her little blast to the past. 

“If you want me to have a plan, find me a case,” Dani shoots back. “If you can’t tell me where to go, this way’s as good as any. Just gotta keep moving. Maybe there’ll be something for us in…”

She pauses, craning her neck to get a glimpse of a road sign so overgrown with creeping vines the only thing distinguishing it from the equally-strung-up tree by its side was the roots writhing above the ground. Mother Nature has a funny way of taking things back. “...Cotopaxi. Sounds like a real charmer, right?”

“What the hell kind of hick name is Cotopaxi?” JT mutters, his hand going to the knife on his belt.

Dani whistles softly, steering the car around a bend. Cotopaxi comes into view then, and calling it a town would be generous to the point of absurdity. It was more like four houses, a motel, and a bar. She wouldn’t have been surprised if a tumbleweed suddenly rolled across the empty dirt road spanning the town’s single street. Then again, Cotopaxi was offering her a bed and access to alcohol. What else did she need? “We’re in rural Wyoming, Jedidiah Taco. You hear that?”

“Hear what?” JT glares at her; he’s suspecting something already.

Dani brings her finger to her temple, fighting desperately to keep a straight face. “That’s the banjos playing in the distance. Say, Jell-O Theodore, you ever seen  _ Deliverance? _ ”

* * *

“ _ Satanism?”  _ It’s all Dani can do to not bust out laughing there and then. “Do you know how rare actual violent Satanic cults are? It’s a bunch of stupid kids clowning around in an abandoned house, probably having some fun ducking under yellow tape. A reverse cross does not necessarily mean Satanists.”

“We’ve driven further for less,” JT argues, pointing to a town name in one of his newspaper clippings. “Dani, if there’s actual Satanism being practiced here-”

“-which there isn’t-”

“-it’s more than possible that there’d be demonic activity,” JT finishes, ignoring her interruption entirely. “Something like-”

“-like our demon?” Dani shakes her head, laughing bitterly. “Our demon isn’t the kind of D-list hellion that hangs out with stupid little humans to see what it can get them to do. If it was our demon, it wouldn’t be a reverse cross you’re showing me, it’d be a massacre.”

JT inhales slowly - the fact that he’s not snapping back means his patience really is wearing thin with her. “Okay. So it’s not our demon. But it could be-”

“Are you guys hunters?”

At the new voice - and the word  _ hunters  _ \- Dani’s hand flies straight to her knife and she spins around on a dime to face the interrupter. The light from the bar glints off her blade and he steps back, still mostly cloaked in shadow for now. “Where did you hear that word?” Dani hisses, taking another step closer to him. He staggers back at once, pressing himself up against the back wall, his head angled slightly towards the blade so he can keep his eyes on it.

The light casts on him suddenly, and Dani’s lucky that he’s not something sinister because she falters for half a second when she sees him. Suit that she couldn’t buy with everything to her name, sculpted face like a doll’s, golden-brown hair she can just see him combing to perfection in the bathroom mirror every morning. But that’s not what throws her. It’s his eyes. There’s something about those eyes. They’re wide, innocent, splashed with the kind of color Dani’s only ever seen on eyeballs in pamphlets for colored contacts. They’re tide pool blue, she decides, a vivid, rich blue, bursting with life, shining with vitality. Dani’s seen evil before, and this isn’t it. His eyes are the antithesis of demon eyes.

That won’t stop her from running him through if she has to.

“Yeah, you’re definitely a hunter -  _ I’m not a demon I promise- _ ” The words start flowing faster when Dani’s blade comes to rest between his third and fourth rib. She learned that early on: the best way to hold someone at knifepoint in a place where you can’t really get away with that. Her body blocks the knife from the view of any other patrons, and one false move, this guy’s a kebab. “I’m a consultant!”

“The fuck’s a consultant?” Dani snarls. She puts just a bit more pressure on the end of the blade and the tip breaks through the top layer of Pretty Boy’s fancy thousand-dollar suit jacket. “I don’t like strangers knowing about me, so you need to start talking, buddy, or things are gonna be looking pretty bleak for your life expectancy.”

“You were just talking about hunting demons,” Pretty Boy points out. “I overheard, that’s all. I’m working a case, and I need a hunter. Not five minutes later, I hear you two talking about demons. I got excited.”

“What do you mean, you’re working a case?” Dani looks him up and down, snorting dismissively. Pretty Boy’s as skinny as a rail with the muscle tone to match, and the suit’s not exactly giving off  _ rugged adventurer  _ vibes. “You don’t look like much of a hunter to me.”

“I’m not a hunter,” Pretty Boy insists, his eyes darting away from the blade and up to Dani’s, locking eye contact with her. “That’s why I need you. Look. My name is Malcolm Bright. I’m unarmed. You can pat me down if you want. Just - just let me off the wall, and we’ll get out of here. I need to talk to you somewhere we won’t be overheard.”

“Why should we trust you?” JT asks. There’s contemplation soaking his voice and Dani knows that he’s already mentally frisking Bright, trying to decide where Pretty Boy might be keeping any extra toys.

“You don’t have to trust me,” Bright says, and then he has the nerve to give Dani a devilish smile and a little wink that makes her want to kick him in the business and impale him on her knife like an appetizer on a skewer. “But it’s two-on-one and you guys have all the weapons. So I think it’s safe to say that I’m trusting you a good bit more than you’re trusting me.”

JT turns to look at her, his hand hovering an inch above her shoulder as if she were a lit candle he was contemplating extinguishing. “He’s got a point, Dani.”

He does. That doesn’t mean she has to like it. Something about those eyes unsettles her. Her soul shifts restlessly inside her when he meets her eyes. She takes another step closer, halving the already tiny distance between them. The tip of her knife cuts through the last of Pretty Boy’s fancy suit, pricking his ribs just enough to draw a single, perfect ruby bead to the surface of his skin. “Watch yourself, Bright,” she says softly, venom dripping off her tongue and staining her teeth. “You wouldn’t be the first thing I’ve stabbed with this knife.” 

Then she lets him go, sheathing her knife underneath her leather jacket once more and backing off just enough to let him peel himself away from the wall, his hand going to his side where she pricked him. “You have a very steady hand, Dani.”

The way he says her name - low, reverent, tinged with relief and a new respect she doesn’t get often from men on the road - sends shivers turning pirouettes down her spine and she fights back a shudder. She roughly snatches her bag from the back of her chair and tugs it over her shoulder, throwing down a small pile of bills to cover their drinks. “Let’s just get out of here before anyone  _ else  _ listens to things they shouldn’t.”

* * *

Pretty Boy is also Rich Boy, Dani decides, running her finger over the grip of a seventeenth century pistol worth more than the Impala. Bright’s house reeks of old money, probably a gift from Daddy back in the big city, a present for his precious son gone on some sabbatical of whim. Dani always hated families like that, back when she was still living in Chicago before she ever knew what a demon was . Bright had been struck by some impulse to isolate himself for an introspective journey, suckered Daddy into buying him a pretty house to live in in a small town, stuffed it full of old junk that rich people loved to collect, and stumbled upon the truth by accident. Now he was living in Cotopaxi, playing hunter for the thrills without any of the danger, calling himself a consultant and reading books about ghosts and dusting his windows with salt to feel special.

“Careful with that,” Bright says quietly, standing in the shadowed corner with his hands in his pockets, watching her closely. His eyes lingered on her the whole way from the bar, as if she were some mildly interesting sitcom on midday television, watched by old ladies and third shifters. “It’s loaded.”

“You can still fire this thing?”

The corner of Bright’s mouth quirks up, and he inclines his head slightly in her direction. “See for yourself.”

Dani does. The anatomy of the gun is a little dated, but it’s all the same concept, and she knows how to handle firearms. “Silver bullets.”  _ Maybe Pretty Boy does know what he’s playing with.  _

“I’m not a hunter, but I’m also not stupid. I’ve angered enough nasty things to know that a few extra precautions doesn’t hurt.” Bright’s gaze drifts to a patch of the wooden floorboards and Dani follows it. Pretty Boy’s drawn himself a protective circle with more salt in the center of his living room, another gun that would have given a museum curator a hard-on resting in the center.  
“Bad choice.” She doesn’t know why she’s helping him, but the words leave her mouth before she can question herself. “Salt is impermanent. It’s easy to break a salt circle. Something like a hellhound wouldn’t be stalled five minutes by that thing. You’re gonna wanna get chalk and four statues of the four sons of Horus: Imsety, Duamutef, Hapi, and Qebehsenuef. Draw your circle again with the chalk, put one of each at the four corners.”

Bright nods slowly. Intrigue dawns over his face like the sun rising, those pretty, bewitching eyes tracking her every move. “North, east, south, and west.”

“Exactly. You can keep holy water or salt in there if you’re feeling over-the-top, but you shouldn’t need it. That’s old magic. Goes all the way back to Egyptian tombs to keep out evil. And they knew what they were doing when it came to spellwork.”

“It sounds like you do too,” Bright says quietly. He’s still looking at her, eyes boring through her, and her spine burns under his gaze.

On the other side of the room, JT clears his throat loudly, and Dani’s ashamed to say she jumps. At least Bright does the same, and far worse. But she can still feel JT’s gaze lingering on her, and her cheeks flush hot. She ignores him pointedly, clearing her own throat and when she speaks again, she sounds so clinically professional she could be interviewing him.

“You’re packing enough firepower here to light up the first circle of hell, if all of this is silver bullets. What do you need hunters for?”

“Little things like minor spirits I can handle. I’ve burned bones, destroyed cursed objects. But I’m not a hunter. Just because I’m prepared for a fight doesn’t mean I’m good in one.” Bright strides over to a polished mahogany desk that’s at least a hundred years old and probably a rich family heirloom, rifling around in the messy stacks of paper atop the desk before producing a file at least twice as thick as anything she and JT or even Ellen have ever put together. “I have a case, and I need hunters to deal with it. Eight suicides in Glenmont, the next town over, in the past month. All people who previously seemed happy, healthy, and comfortable. All plunged from the same bridge into the same ravine.”

“We’ve been looking for a hunt,” JT says, striding over to the desk and holding out his hand for the file. Bright hesitates, holding onto his precious papers, but JT doesn’t back down and after a moment he hands them over, his hands sinking nervously back into his pockets as he watches him go over the file.

“What are we looking at?” Dani pushes after a few minutes of watching him peruse the stack of paper. “Our kind of gig?”

“...it’s a demon,” JT says, after another long moment, and Dani’s heart automatically picks up speed, pounding in her ears and sending a savage warmth rushing through her body. “It’s not  _ our  _ demon. Weaker. Not as powerful. It’s just getting its rocks off, as best as I can figure. We’re looking at a garden-variety case of possession.”

“Possess the victim, drive them to the bridge, force them over the edge, and abandon the host after they’re already over the edge,” Dani fills in. “Yeah, that’s our kind of gig, alright. You’re in luck, Pretty Boy. JT and I specialize in demons.”

“How do you know it’s a demon?” Bright questions, because he can’t keep his stupid pretty mouth shut. “Compared to spirit activity, demonic incidents are so rare-”

“You don’t say,” JT snorts.

“Thanks, Einstein. We’re aware.” Dani lets herself sink onto his plush leather couch - rich people are parasites, but God, is it fun to crash in their houses - and kicks her legs up, muffling a sigh of relief as the persistent ache in her back finally fades. “But moving victims that far from the first site? That’s beyond any spirit I’ve ever heard of. Possession is a demon’s calling card.”

“Okay.” Bright takes a deep breath, and his eyes are still fixated upon Dani. “A demon. How do we kill it?”

“We don’t. I thought you’d know more than that, Bright.” Dani shakes her head mockingly at him, clicking her tongue chidingly. “You can’t kill something that can’t die. This isn’t about wasting it. It’s gonna be an exorcism.”

` “What’s the difference?”

Dani stares at him intently, shuffling through his layers like pages of a book, searching for any sign of mockery. But there is none. For now at least, it seems he’s actually just trying to learn from them. “Killing’s permanent,” she says finally. “No coming back. Wasted and gone. An exorcism’s a temporary fix. Knocks ‘em down into hell until they manage to crawl their ugly asses back out into the daylight. We can buy you a few years, at least.”

“Only a few years?” Pretty Boy phrases it like a question, but there’s a hint of an accusation underneath and Dani bristles at once.

“You want to look for someone who can do better? Be my guest.”

“No!” Dani’s ears prick up in interest; she hit one of Pretty Boy’s pretty little nerves. “No,” he says again, a little calmer this time. “A few years. What do we do?”

“Well, for now…” Dani taps her wrist where she doesn’t wear a watch. “JT and I will take the file back to our motel room. Look for victim similarity, connections, anything that could tell us where the demon’ll strike next. Tomorrow, you’ll take us to Glenmont. We’ll find the sucker, JT’ll trap it somewhere, and I’ll perform the exorcism. We’ll be on the road again by the next day.”

“Looking for your demon,” Bright adds. He’s not asking a question. 

Dani and JT swap a look; the same, heavy look they always share whenever the demon gets brought up. The cursed, wretched thing they’re no closer to catching than they were when they first started together, when they were out on their own.

Dani’s been hunting this thing three years now. And it’s never dared to show its face near her again. 

Finally, she nods stiffly. “Yeah. Our demon.”

“You should stay here,” Bright says suddenly, gesturing around Baby’s First Mini-Mansion. “I have more files, lore on Cotopaxi and the surrounding towns, reference books, the only laptop in town with Internet access...you should sleep here for the night. You’ll get a lot more done than you will in that motel room.”

Dani glances over at JT for guidance on that one. As the lead on the research half of their team, it’s his decision if Bright’s personal reference library is worth staying in the stranger’s house. He looks back over at her, subconsciously rubbing the back of his neck as he looks her up and down, then glances back over at Bright.

He worries about her. Dani supposes she should find that sweet. Part of the hazards of existing in such a man’s world had gotten her grabbed by another hunter once when she stepped out of a Minnesota bar for a smoke break. She’d reached for her knife, but he’d grabbed it before she could and told her in none-too-nice terms what she was going to do for him if she didn’t want to be breathing through her neck.

He hadn’t gotten any more off than her jacket before JT pummeled him into the asphalt so hard he got road rash. But Dani half-suspected JT had been as scarred by the incident as she was. Whatever had happened there, he’d left twice as protective of her with the kind of big brother instincts she thought only existed in movies.

And it is sweet of him to think of her first when they’re talking about sleeping in a strange man’s home. A different kind of man and maybe she’d agree. “JT,” she says, trying not to laugh too hard. “He’s got less than an inch on me and I bet you I could throw him if I wanted to. If anyone’s in danger here, it’s him.”

Bright just holds up his hands in surrender, a light smile teasing over his lips.  _ Guilty as charged. _

* * *

Dani knows she should sleep. They were up till the witching hour looking over Bright’s case, she was exhausted even before then, and sleep-deprivation throws her off her game. Anything that could count as a chink in her armor, even so much as just being tired, made her vulnerable to demonic possession. And she doubts JT and Bright could manage an exorcism on their own, not when she’s the only one who even knows the words to their best.

It’s a favorite of theirs, a broad net that’s never let one escape yet. She mouths the words to herself as she lays on Bright’s couch, snuggled up under a scratchy woolen rich people blanket woven as a decoration. A pronouncement of wealth, not a comfortable cover.

JT was a master at trapping demons. He’d never let one so much as breathe on her when she was performing an exorcism. But they still made her nervous. The exorcism first cast the demon out of its host, then banished it back to hell. The space in between those two events was the sticker.

A demon existing independently of a host had double the power and triple the rage, unlimited by the restraints of a human form. The swirling, raging, savage tornadoes of black dust loomed over her, screaming threats and hissing chants. Threatening to drag her through the carpet of flaming coals in hell by her ankles if she didn’t stop. And as long as she was in the midst of the exorcism, she was vulnerable. There wasn’t much she could do to defend herself.

JT was good at making sure she didn’t need to. That didn’t make it any easier on her nerves. Knowing she was the last thing an army of vicious hellions had seen just before they were cast into a pit of eternal fire and brimstone wasn’t exactly the recipe for a good night’s sleep.

Dani glances over at JT, sound asleep and snoring on the other half of the overstuffed, plushy leather sectional. They’ve only been riding together a year, but she already can’t imagine hunting without him. Sometimes, after hunts that had gone down rough, over a fourth or fifth or sixth drink, he’d tell her about Tally. From what little she’d heard, Tally sounded like a real catch.

And that makes sense. JT isn’t built for this kind of life. Maybe Dani isn’t either. Maybe they’re both born for a happy marriage and two-and-a-half kids and an apple pie life behind a white picket fence in a faceless suburb. When she was sixteen, that sounded right. Good, even. The most she could ask for, at least.

Now she can barely imagine reaching that kind of peace.

_ No one is born broken. Someone breaks us.  _

Without warning, a searing pain rips down her side where the demon had burned her ten years ago. Sometimes it was sore. This isn’t that. It burns like fire, like it had on the day it had been written into her side. Dani hisses through clenched teeth, arching her back off the couch as she clutches at her side. Her breaths come in in ragged gasps. She tries to stifle them as much as she can, determined not to wake JT. 

Burning embers are being stitched into her ribs. The pain is inescapable. It’s a new kind of agony. It surrounds her, engulfs her, swallows her. Her vision sears white. Her lungs scream in protest. That same invisible knife stabs into her side, over and over again, drawing no blood but sawing across her nerves until they plead for mercy.

She grabs at the scar, trying futilely to stop the pain, and then she isn't there anymore. Suddenly she’s outside, and the cold night air bites at her skin and stings her cheeks and crystallizes on her eyelashes. She opens her stiff, aching eyelids, and nearly collapses at what she sees.

She’s perched on the very edge of something - a bridge, maybe? Her boots slide over the slick railing, threatening to send her pitching forward over the edge. And over the edge is nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, nothingness all the way down hundreds of feet, a gaping maw that opened at last into a ravine. The drop snaps at her with reaching jaws. The open mouth of blackness reaches out and loops around something sick inside her, something that shoves her closer and closer to the edge.

And then she goes over and she’s falling, flailing through space with nothing there to catch her-

She slams back down against Bright’s stupid fucking couch, her eyes clenched tightly shut. She’s afraid to open them, terrified that she’ll look and be on the edge of a ravine like that over all again.

Slowly, she forces herself to let her eyes flutter open. Back in Bright’s living room. JT’s still passed out on the couch; his long, even breaths soothe her slightly and the worst of the tension trickles from her muscles. She’s left draped across the plush cushions, shaky and lightheaded, like someone had loosened the screws holding her together. One thing she knows for sure.

She’s going to throw up.

As quietly as she can, Dani picks herself up from the couch, one arm wrapped around her stomach, outstretched fingers covering the still-tingling scar on her ribs. She strides from the living room and through the hallway. The back of one hand pressed to her mouth, she makes a beeline for the door at the end of the hall. 

Shutting the door firmly behind her, Dani flicks on the faucet for some white noise and then crumples to her knees in front of the toilet. Still straining for air from the mental attack, she reaches back and gathers her curls into a loose, messy ponytail with one hand as her whiskey from the bar crawls up into her throat.

Even when she’s hollowed her stomach out, after she reaches up and flushes it away, she can’t bring herself to stand. Her legs are shaking like gelatin, her head is spinning slowly like some kind of sadistic merry-go-round, and her mouth tastes like something died in it.

She hates getting sick. It’s the one thing that can really knock her out of commission. Pain is just an annoyance. She’s worked through injuries that should have put her in the hospital. But puking digs in deep, makes her want to lay down and curl up in a ball on the cold tile floor and die.

Droplets of sweat are beading on her forehead and the porcelain toilet seat is refreshingly cool, so Dani lets her head rest against it and tries not to think about the sample plate she split with JT back at the bar. 

Exhausted, she slowly lets her other hand slip up underneath her cotton shirt, tracing the letters etched into her side carefully. They’re still tender, and she gives a sharp intake of breath as soon as her fingers brush over the scar.

JT has one too; she’s seen it. They compared them once in a motel room after another lead turned up dead. His reads  _ Tally.  _ A sick version of a couples tattoo. He’d always assumed the demon wrote the name of its victim on the person who found them. Going by that logic, Dani should have been scarred with  _ Robert.  _

But she wasn’t. 

The demon had held her frozen in place while eight long letters were branded into her ribs, a word she’d never heard before that day.  _ Cultella.  _

Why the monster that murdered her father wanted her to wear the word  _ knife  _ on her body forever, she didn’t know. But she doubted it was any kind of compliment.

* * *

“I’ve never hunted a demon before,” Pretty Boy announces from the backseat of the Impala, as if he hadn’t already made that abundantly obvious through his actions. “How do you know what to look for?”

JT turns to Dani - demon detection checklist is her department. She sighs; she’s still exhausted from last night and she’s in no mood to take Bright’s ass back to hunter first grade. “Any kind of emotional distress leaves someone open to demonic possession. Once it’s inside, there’s a couple of ways to tell. Holy water burns them.”

In shotgun, JT solemnly cocks one of the Nerf guns they picked up a couple months back for exactly this purpose. Creating holy water is an official pain in the ass; it took Dani a month and a half to dig up the incantation and half an hour to read it correctly. But she’d managed, and now a staple of the loaded trunk of the Impala is a five-gallon barrel of holy water that had once held Kool-Aid at a kid’s birthday party. 

“Of course, that’s not the subtlest, and people tend to get pissed off if you start shooting at them with water guns. They flinch at the name of Christ. It’s  _ Cristo,  _ by the way.”

“I know what it is,” Bright mumbles under his breath in the backseat. “Go over your game plan again.”

Dani sighs again, heavier this time. “We’ll let JT out at the edge of town. He’ll scout it out, find somewhere to trap the demon. You’ll stay with me while we locate the sucker. We’ll tail it till JT calls us with the directions, lure it to the trap, and then JT will hold it while I do the exorcism. The demon will return to hell, the host will return to normal, no more suicides. Simple enough?”

“What happens if we can’t lure it?” Bright pushes, because Pretty Boy can’t just keep his mouth shut and let them do their jobs.

“Let’s hope we don’t find out.” Glenmont comes into view around the bend; it’s the same size as Cotopaxi and not a hair more interesting. Dani brings the Impala to a halt, reaching over to clap JT’s shoulder. “This is you, Jezebel Tuesday.”

“Gonna let that demon have you,” JT mumbles, unbuckling his seatbelt. “You be careful. Get in, find it, and get out. Don’t die for a hunt.”

“Yes,  _ Mom. _ ” Dani smiles for the first time today, looking at him through the open window as he shuts the door behind him. “I can handle myself.”

“I know you can. But if things go south, throw Bright to the demon and get out of there.”

“You know I will.”

“Why did I ever doubt you guys?” Pretty Boy mumbles from the backseat. “Can I sit up front now?”

“No.”

Dani finds a safe place to stash the Impala and abandons her baby for now, arming herself and Bright with Nerf guns before slamming the trunk shut. Bright stares over her shoulder in awe at her and JT’s weapons collection, his mouth half-open.

“Why so much?” he asks, stashing the water pistol underneath his two thousand-dollar Angora wool overcoat. Dani snorts in fresh disgust at Pretty Boy’s idea of a demon-hunting outfit, tugging her leather jacket tighter around herself.

“Ever read  _ The Art of War?  _ Sun Tzu?” She asks, doing a quick double-check of her own supplies. A crucifix for the exorcism. An extra vial of holy water. An iron knife. Super Soaker XP100 loaded with holy water. 

“It’s on my list,” Bright replies with an easy smile.

Dani rolls her eyes again, reaching over to tighten the strap of his Super Soaker. “Stay strapped or get clapped, Bright. Remember,  _ Cristo. _ ”

“ _ Cristo _ ,” Bright repeats after her, his eyes lingering on her even after she steps away from the Super Soaker.

“Good girl. Let’s go find a demon.”

The good news about Glenmont is that it, as announced by an (in Dani’s opinion) entirely redundant sign, is limited to a population of about a hundred people. And most of them appear to be in the street at the moment. “You stay with  _ me, _ ” she orders Bright as they approach the gaggle of townspeople. “We push through the crowd. Take it nice and slow. I’m a walking church at this point. If you see anyone flinching, point it out to me  _ subtly.  _ Okay?”

Bright nods. His shoulders are stiff with tension and Dani’s pleased to see he’s finally lost some of his swagger, even if some of hers is draining away as well. 

Something always gets to her about demons. How easily they walk among humans. How anyone around her could be possessed. How easy it is to be tricked. How easy it is to lose someone.

She weaves her way into the crowd. Bright trails after her like a lost kitten. She scans their faces, looks into their eyes. Grief is a common factor, but they’ve lost a lot these days…

Which means any one of them could be wide open to demonic possession right now.

Dani takes a deep, shaky breath and keeps walking. 

“-so sad, another one just last night-” she hears. Just fragments. Snippets of a picture to piece together like a jigsaw puzzle.

“-only twenty-two-”

“-so sad-”

“-sheriff’s talking about sealing it up-”

“-over the bridge just like the rest of them-”

The nausea that hit her last night returns at half-force, but half is still enough to force a near-gag and send her hand flying to her mouth. She closes her eyes for a second, trying not to think about the sensation of flailing helplessly in midair. 

“Dani?” She startles at the sound of her own name and whirls on Bright hovering just behind her. She knows her eyes must look wild and she takes another deep breath, trying to calm herself.  _ I can’t get upset. I can’t get upset. That just makes me vulnerable.  _

“I’m fine,” she says stiffly, turning back around and plunging back into the crowd.

“Hang on. Dani, hang on. Dani-”

_ This is why we don’t pick up random good-looking assholes who call themselves consultants.  _ Dani spins back around, anger and annoyance bubbling at a slow boil in her chest. “ _ What,  _ Pretty Boy?”

Bright slowly tilts his head to the side, and Dani follows it to one man standing alone in the crowd. She narrows her eyes, getting a better look at his features. They’re stiff, unmalleable, like those of a plastic doll. He stands awkwardly, as if poised on a podium. 

_ “Cristo,”  _ Dani breathes, just loud enough for her voice to carry over to him.

He jerks back like he’s been burned, and for just a split second, his eyes go as black as coals. He recovers fast - demons are the masters of disguise - but Dani’s seen enough. “Good eyes, Pretty Boy,” she admits grudgingly, taking a slow step over to their target. “That’s it.”

“How are we going to lure it?” Bright pushes, a proud little smile on his stupid face at her praise.

“We’re not,” Dani replies, her eyes trained on the man. “Not till JT calls. By then I’ll have a plan. I just need to think.”

“Are you implying I should shut up?”

“No, of course not.” Dani jabs her elbow into his ribs, not hard enough to hurt but a wake-up call all the same. “I’m saying it flat-out. Shut up.”

* * *

Dani’s phone rings after an eternity, which isn’t anywhere near long enough. “You got him?” JT asks by means of greeting, his voice crackling through the speaker of her phone.

“Been tailing him for about thirty minutes now. Where am I leading this son of a bitch?”

“About a mile out of town, there’s an abandoned house. Abandoned for a reason, this thing needs to be  _ condemned.  _ It’s a gold mine. The whole thing’s basically a demonic roach motel at this point. Can you get him that far?”

“I’ll make him get that far. You know I’ll manage. See you, Jefferson Tortilla.” Dani hangs up before he can sigh in disgust, turning to look Bright up and down. God, if only she had another plan. She’d done worse with worse, but that didn’t make the current prospect any more enticing.

Before she can change her mind, Dani pushes herself up on her toes, wrapping her arms around Bright’s neck in a lover’s embrace. Thankfully, he catches on quick and hugs her back, even though she can sense the befuddlement coming off him in waves. “You’re gonna take me over there and break up with me,” she orders in a whisper in his ear, inhaling a deep breath of his cologne and pressing herself against him. “I’m gonna run away in tears. You’re going to head the other way, get out of town, and find the abandoned house a mile out.”

“So your plan is to take the demon inside yourself?” Bright cuts in, his breath warm on her ear, sending a shiver down her spine. “Dani, that’s not an option-”

“It’s not actually going inside me. I have a crucifix. I have defenses. I just need it to think I’m vulnerable. I’ll go to the abandoned house to cry, it’ll follow me in to take me over, and boom, fresh-caught demon.”

“Dani, this isn’t safe-”

“Hunting demons isn’t safe. Now take me over there and dump my ass already, Pretty Boy.”

Bright exhales heavily, then tugs her over to the other side of the one street in Glenmont, pushing her off him with just a little coarseness. “I’m breaking up with you now,” he deadpans, gesticulating angrily at her.

Dani brings her hand to her thigh and digs her nails in until she feels a trickle of blood. Tears rush to her eyes and she lets them fall, tapping into the high school version of herself who did one school play. “I don’t understand, I thought you loved me.”

Bright gestures wildly at her again, his face contorting with an anger that doesn’t match his voice. “I don’t. I’m dumping you.”

Dani bites her lip until blood runs into her mouth to force a sob and then turns and runs away from him, passing by the storefront where the demon stands deliberately. She feels his eyes swivel onto her, run the length of her body appreciatively.  _ Please let this work.  _

* * *

She’s out of breath by the time she finds the house JT told her about on the call, her knees aching from the jarring impact of running so far. Without slowing, she runs up the stairs that creak under her boots; JT was right, not a single part of this shack’s up to code.

As soon as she enters the main room, she looks up; JT has encompassed most of the room in a massive devil’s trap painted on the ceiling. Dani sinks down in the center of it, forcing sobs that scrape her throat. 

“It’s all right.”

She startles at the new, foreign voice; it’s low, grating, grinding away at her skin. She turns around and there he is, eyes turned to two black coals. “It’s all right,” he says again, reaching out to her with one long, slender hand. “It won’t hurt anymore in a moment.”

He steps into the devil’s trap. Dani scuttles back at once, wiping away a few straggling tears from her cheeks with her sleeves. “JT!”

JT leaps up from behind the crumbling, rotted remains of what had probably once been a couch, Super Soaker armed and at the ready. “Nice job, Powell. And the Oscar goes to…”

The demon stares at them both, a mixture of shock, rage, and fear darting over his face. “What is this?”

“This?” Dani lets a smile come over her face at last, plunging her hand into her pocket to retrieve the holy water vial and her crucifix necklace. “It’s a devil’s trap,  _ bitch. _ ”

Bright emerges as well from behind the couch, creeping over to join them. “So now she’s going to exorcise it?”

“You bet your ass, Pretty Boy.” Dani raises the crucifix, carefully uncorking the vial of holy water. She dashes it over the demon, careful to remain outside the devil’s trap. His face screws up in pain, smoke pluming from the splotches where the droplets hit home. “Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus…”

The demon’s face scrunches up and it howls in pain, a high-pitched, inhuman sound. “Stop! Stop this at once! I swear, girl, stop or I’ll-”

“...Omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii…”

“-flay the skin from your bones and roast your corpse in hell-”

“...omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica.”

“-the racks, girl, I swear I’ll have your soul on the racks-”

“... Ergo, omnis legio diabolica, adiuramus te…”

Dani winces in preparation, waiting for the demon to break free. This part’s always the worst. The man’s jaw unhinges like a snake’s, and with a great and terrible roar, he vomits out a torrent of swirling black dust that spirals into the air, slamming against the invisible walls of the devil’s trap. Underneath it, the body of the host falls limp and silent. Only unconscious, hopefully.

“...cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque aeternae perditionìs venenum propinare…” Dani picks up the speed of her chanting, fear roaring like a lion in her chest. Iron bands tighten around her lungs and she stops to gasp for air, coughing out the Latin incantation.

_ I know everything about you.  _ This time, the voice rings inside her skull, and Dani falters, her free hand going to her temple. The ache in her head is building, turning into a searing, pulsing pain. 

“Dani? Dani, come on-” JT’s voice is tightening with worry. “Dani, the exorcism!”

_ I know everything about him. About all of them. I can tell you what it means. _

“Propinare,” Dani repeats feebly, knocking her head against her fist.  _ Come on, Dani, come on, focus, focus… _

_ Cultella, is it? The Knife. I can tell you what it means. _

Dani inhales sharply, her hand going to her side. “You don’t know anything!”

_ I know why my sister marked you with that word. And I can tell you. But you have to let me go. _

Dani bites her lip until fresh blood runs over her tongue, pounding her fist into her own temple. “Get out of my head!”

_ I can’t get out of your head, Daniela. I have been written into your head. I am as much a part of you as your own skeleton.  _

“I’m going to send you so deep into hell I’ll be dead and gone by the time you crawl back out!” Dani shrieks, her voice high-pitched and rife with something feral. “Propinare vade, Satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae-”

Searing pain splits her head down the center and Dani crumples to the ground, curling up in a ball and clutching her head. She’s sobbing again, this time for real, choking on her own blood and tears. “Stop! Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop stop stop _ stop- _ ”Her words run together and she sobs harder, both hands clutching futilely at her temples, the string of the crucifix digging into the palm of her right hand. “Get out of my head!”

_ Break the devil’s trap. _

“ _ No! _ ” Dani shrieks again, frantically scrambling through the shattered fragments of her memory. “-hostis humanae salutis - humiliare sub potenti manu Dei-”

Something crackles overhead, and Dani just barely processes the flames bursting out of the floorboards like dragon’s breath. The dried, rotted wood catches like gasoline and in seconds she’s choking on smoke, writhing on the floor like a seizing snake. “Bright, JT!  _ JT!” _

“I’m here!” His big, calloused hand cups her cheek briefly before his hands go around her waist, trying to pick her up. “We’re getting out of here-”

“You can’t,” Dani pants through half-blinded eyes, her chest heaving as she struggles for air. “He’s in me, he can hurt me - if we go out the door I’ll die. Listen -  _ listen to me _ -”

Her head rings again and she blindly finds JT’s hand to squeeze, gritting her teeth against a scream. “You need to get out of here.”

“Dani, don’t be an idiot. If you’re staying, I’m staying.” JT’s hand squeezes hers back just as tightly, his other hand going behind her pounding head to support it.

“Get  _ out!”  _ Dani shakes her head as much as she can through the migraine. “I can’t do this if I’m worrying about you, just get out!”

“Dani, you could  _ die- _ ”

“And if I do, you go find that son of a bitch on your own and kill it for both of us! You need to get out of here, get Bright and the host and go, get out, get  _ out!”  _

JT waits another second, then eases her head down, gives her hand one last squeeze, and then he’s gone. Dani feels his footsteps vibrating the ancient, rotting floors underneath her and she sighs in relief. At least he’s safe. He made it out. No one other than her is dying today.

“-contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine-” She gasps out through deep, heaving breaths. Smoke scalds her lungs and she chokes on it, surrounded in walls of fire. 

_ I can make it stop. I can end the pain now. I can wipe away that scar. Just let me out. _

“I’m not letting you out, bitch!” The invisible cleaver strikes her again, splitting her head in two, and Dani screams in pain, thrashing on the floor like a fish. “-E quem inferi tremunt-”

_ I will tear you in half and rip the skin from your bones and feed it to you! I will stretch you on the torture racks of hell and cook your soul personally for the next hundred years! I will force open your mouth and feed you roaches that will devour your brain piece by piece while you live on!  _

“-Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine!” Dani cries out, her head striking something rock hard, rolling blinded on the flaming floor in a desperate attempt to escape the pain. “Ut Ecclesiam tuam secura tibi facias libertate servire, te rogamus, audi nos!”

The demon wails inside the circle. The last words seal the exorcism; even through the vicious agony raging in her head, she can hear its cries as hell opens its maw for it.  _ Bye, bitch.  _

With a violent sucking noise, the pain in her head suddenly eases up, and the flow of threats tapers off into silence inside her skull. Choking on smoke and wheezing for air, Dani pulls herself up into a crawl, hauling herself towards the elusive door.

It’s too far. She knows that as soon as she starts crawling. The smoke will kill her before she’s within ten feet of it.  _ At least I got the demon.  _ Smoke fogging her brain and strangling her lungs, Dani slowly lets herself sink back to the floor, her eyes fluttering shut. She’s sinking, sinking beneath the waves of an invisible ocean. A gentle, quiet death. Just slipping away on a pillow of smoke. 

Fingers suddenly dig into her ribs and Dani gasps weakly in shock. Someone came after her, arms around her waist, lugging her towards the door. She scrabbles weakly with her feet, trying to help propel herself along the burning floor. 

Somehow they make it out of the house and tumble down the creaking stairs together. He crumples to one knee behind her ten feet away from the treacherous stairs, one arm over her chest to keep her upright. Dani falls back against his chest, leaning against his knee, her head lolling limply to the side. His hand smooths reflexively over her soot-coated curls. Dani sucks in a huge, deep breath of fresh, clean night air, and her stomach flips with the kind of earth-shattering nausea that pitches her forwards, heaving up bile and smoke alike, her throat and nose burning and her lungs aching fiercely.

He gathers back her hair, bunching her curls back into a loose ponytail, and Dani realizes for the first time that her savior is not JT but  _ Bright,  _ it’s Pretty Boy himself who ran into a burning house after her and ruined his two thousand dollar wool coat and sits behind her now, holding her while she pukes.

Dani wipes her mouth weakly on her sleeve when there’s nothing left in her to throw up and Bright guides her back upright to ease her breathing. Bright’s arms wrap back around her waist and he holds her, crouching behind her so she can fall limp against him, and they watch the house burn and crumble into ash together.

* * *

By the time JT comes back with the fire department, Dani can breathe almost normally and Bright has a story to tell the police. Something about hearing a weird noise, going inside to investigate, not sure what started the fire; all staples of lying to the cops. 

Even though she’s still choking on smoke, Dani drives back to Cotopaxi so she doesn’t have to look at Bright. He saved her life. Charged into a burning building to drag her back out to safety, and he didn’t even know if the demon was still in there too or not. She saved his too, probably, by making him and JT leave her. But her panicked screeching lacks the same  panache _.  _

“What happened back there, Powell?” JT asks quietly. He’s got one of the guns in his lap, cleaning it piece by piece. He always cleans the guns when he’s nervous. “It was like something came  _ over  _ you.”

“It got in my head,” Dani rasps. Her voice is still trembling. “Literally, in my head. I could hear it talking to me, making my head ring...and when I said I wouldn’t open the devil’s trap, it did something to me. Something that hurt. There was no running from it. It wormed itself into my head.”

JT nods slowly, running a rag down the grip of the gun in his hand. “Did it work? The exorcism?”

“I got through it,” Dani confirms. “Back to hell.”

“I don’t know,” JT mumbles. “There’s something going on with demons, I’m telling you. It was square in a devil’s trap, it shouldn’t have been able to get to you.”

“It said it was written into my head,” Dani says shakily. “Part of me. As much as my own bones, it said. You don’t - you don’t think I’m possessed, do you?”

JT’s already shaking his head before she gets the whole question out. “No way. Impossible. You’ve been carrying holy water all day, you’ve been saying the name of Christ...there’s nothing evil in you.”

“He’s right,” Bright pipes up from the backseat, and Dani’s possibly never in her life been less in the mood to be grated on by Pretty Boy’s pretty voice. “You said it yourself earlier, you were a walking church. Even I know a demon couldn’t get through all of that.”

“..okay. So it’s not a demon. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing evil in me. Doesn’t mean I’m safe to be around.” Dani’s eyes burn as bad as her throat, her fingers going white around the wheel. “You need to keep going. Without me.”

“Right,” JT snorts disbelievingly. “I left you for ten minutes back there and you almost met Jesus.”

Dani takes a deep, shaky breath, trying to ignore Bright’s eyes boring through her in the backseat. “...it knew about me. About everything. About  _ Cultella. _ ”

JT inhales sharply, hissing through his teeth. “Impossible.”

“You’re the only person on the planet I’ve told about that. Which means what happened back there wasn’t just scratching the surface, trying to put me off my game. It got in deep. I’m not a partner anymore. I’m a liability. If I was any less stubborn, we’d all be dead.”

“You’re  _ my  _ liability,” JT insists. His hands are shaking slightly on the pieces of the gun. “Demon brain or not, you think I couldn’t take your scrawny ass if you go psycho on me? You’re coming, or we’re both staying.”

Dani’s throat goes tight all over again and she barely manages to nod, the empty road blurring before her eyes through a thin veneer of tears.

* * *

JT’s snoring on the couch again. Dani envies him sometimes, how easily he manages to slip away. His memories visit him when he’s already awake. She’s plagued day and night.

Sighing, she gives up on sleep and gets to her feet, padding towards the kitchen. Her fingers dig into her pocket and produce the last of a few battered tea bags she picked up at their last stop for supplies. She’s been trying to ration them - God knows when she’ll be able to get more - but tonight’s a night for tea if there’s ever been one.

As tired as she is, limbs weighed down with lead, Dani is a purist. So she digs around in Bright’s kitchen - he has every appliance and tool he could ever need and then his entire food inventory consists of a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter - and fills his kettle, putting it on the gas stove to boil.

As soon as the whistle sounds, she lifts the kettle, pouring herself a cup into one of Bright’s overly fancy artisan ceramic mugs. Unwinding the string of the battered Earl Grey, she sighs, not quite ready to give it up.

“I wouldn’t use that one,” a soft voice says suddenly. Dani startles, whirling around with her hand on the knife that she sleeps with, ready to draw.

Bright chuckles nervously, putting up his hands. “I surrender.”

Dani shakes herself quickly, releasing her grip on the hilt of her knife. “You should be asleep.”

“I could say the same for you.” Bright steps over to her, gently pushing away the tea bag. “Save it. I’ll make you a custom blend. I’m something of an artist myself,” he adds, a bit belatedly. “I can make you something better for your throat.”

Dani’s eyes trail him suspiously, but she drops the Earl Grey back into her pocket with a slow nod. “Careful, Pretty Boy. I take my tea seriously.” Her voice breaks on the last word and she cringes, her hand going to her throat before she can stop herself.

“So do I, I assure you.” Bright gives her that stupid, pretty, winning smile and whisks away the steaming cup, opening one of the cabinets Dani had neglected to open herself.

For a moment, the only sound in the house is JT’s snores drifting in from the living room and Bright puttering about in the kitchen, packing a strainer with loose tea. Finally, he sets a cup of steaming amber liquid in front of her. Dani reaches for it, but he puts up a finger to stop her with a wink. “One second. The finishing touch.”

He produces a bear-shaped plastic bottle and squeezes a generous squirt of honey into her tea, offering her a silver spoon to stir it in. “Subtler than sugar and more soothing. It’ll help your throat.”

Dani picks up the cup again, taking a hesitant test sip. It’s good, one of the best cups she’s ever had; the sweetness is present but subtle like Bright promised, complimenting a complex herbal blend that coats her throat and soothes at last the inflammation from the smoke. “You know what you’re doing,” she admits grudgingly, taking another sip.

Bright smiles, leaning across the counter on his elbows. “You don’t like me very much, do you?”

“You annoy me,” Dani corrects. “Doesn’t mean I don’t like you.”

Which is a good cop-out answer, because she has no idea if she likes Bright or not. He’s irritating, cocky, spoiled, rich. He knows about their world, not a lot, just enough to make him dangerous. But his eyes make her feel like the world’s swaying side-to-side beneath her feet, threatening to flip over and her along with it, a feeling that’s half unsettling and half the rush of adrenaline that makes her feel more alive than she has in years now. 

He’s handsome. Stupid, but handsome. And he likes her, and she’s fairly sure he wants her to like him too. Annoyingly endearing in a supremely frustrating way, mostly frustrating because she doesn’t know how to feel about him. 

“Well,” he says, his stupid azure eyes seeing right through her. “I think you’re very brave. I think you have grit that not a lot of people have. I think you’re smart, and resourceful, and stubborn in the best way. And I think you’re going to find what you’re looking for.”

Dani stays silent, because she has no idea how to respond, because  _ how do you respond to that?  _ That’s more compliments in one breath than anyone else has ever given her in her life, except maybe for Jo Harvelle, and she tries not to think too hard about Jo these days. Bright’s eyes linger on her for another moment, and then he steps back, heading towards the door from which he came in the first place.

“Good night, Dani. And good luck on the road.” He’s almost gone, and then before she can stop herself-

“Bright.”

He turns back around, one perfect eyebrow arching in surprise, and then Dani pads over on soft sock feet and kisses him. Because fuck it, just  _ fuck it,  _ Bright is pretty and his eyes make her feel something and it’s been so long since she thought about anything other than demons and the dead, and thinking about Bright is a step-up from that.

Bright jolts back slightly in surprise, but he catches himself quickly, his hands drifting down to her hips as she kisses him with smoky breath and honey-flavored lips, the tang of the tea still on her tongue. He smells like Old Spice and chamomile and he’s stronger than she thought he’d be and his hair is soft as it runs silky through her fingers.

“Dani,” he breathes against her neck, and her name sounds so sweet in his mouth. “Are you sure-”

Dani isn’t sure, at least not of her reasoning, but that doesn’t make her want this any less. So she grabs him by the loosened collar of his expensive dress shirt and drags him back against her, sealing his lips with hers. Her other hand gropes for his, nails digging into the back when she finds it, and she drags it to her chest, showing him the trail to take.

Finally, Pretty Boy gets the hint and somehow they stumble down the hall into the bedroom. Dani doesn’t have time to take a look around before she falls back into the cloudy embrace of a rumpled duvet, her hands grabbing and tugging at Bright’s shirt.

_ Please don’t wake up, JT. _

* * *

Dani wakes up at the first crack of dawn leaking in through the gaps between the curtains. Bright’s arm is still slung around her waist, his other hand tangled in her curls. He seemed to be mesmerized by them last night, combing through them and tugging at them and stroking them, one hand always in her hair - not that she was complaining. He had practically worshipped her.

She finds her shirt in one corner of the room and her pants in the other and she scrambles to get halfway dressed before Bright can wake up. She’d rather never talk to him again. That way he can’t spoil it.

Dani eases herself slowly out the door, shutting it carefully behind her so that the hinges don’t squeak and the lock barely clicks. She turns around, and there’s JT, grinning at her with bags under his eyes and lines wrinkling his forehead. “You didn’t.”

Dani doesn’t bother lying. “I did.” He’ll find out anyway.

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to, that’s why.” Dani goes over to the couch, piling the few possession she bothered to unpack back into her bag. “Are you packed? I just want to get out of here.”

“Yeah.” JT throws his own pack over his shoulder, holding open Bright’s front door for her. “I got three suspicious drownings in the last week in Louisiana. You in the mood for something  _ fishy _ ?”

He waggles his eyebrows at her, laughing at his own pun, until Dani hits him with her bag. “Louisiana it is. How far?”

“Almost a day straight.” 

Dani groans out loud, her head already pounding at the thought of that drive. She reaches for the driver’s side door of the Impala, but JT stops her. “How about you ride shotgun? Since you didn’t get much sleep last night-”

Dani swings at him with the bag again.

“I’m serious,” JT pushes. “Get some sleep so you can take over at the halfway point.” She visibly hesitates, and he adds “It’s been a year, Powell. It’s time. I won’t scratch your precious car.”

Dani takes another second to think, then tosses him the keys. “For every dent I find on the Impala, I put another one in your skull.”

“You’re welcome,” JT mutters, taking the driver’s seat.

Dani opens the passenger side door, melting into the seat under the cover of a blanket she keeps in the glovebox for the nights when the Impala doubles as a motel room. Her eyelids are already heavy as she curls up, her head resting against the window.

As JT pulls away, the last thing she sees is Cotopaxi - and Malcolm Bright’s little mansion - lingering behind them in a cloud of dust.

**Author's Note:**

> This isn’t marked as a multi-chap yet, but that can change! I just need to know if there’s interest. If there is, updates will be less frequent but very long (my intention is to write this in episodes, like the show itself.)


End file.
